


A City Sorrow Built

by cmcross



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Funerals, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Regret, Suicide, Unrequited Love, Unspoken Love, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 22:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmcross/pseuds/cmcross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Bilbo Baggins life was a constant parade of funeral processions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A City Sorrow Built

For Bilbo Baggins life was a constant parade of funeral processions.

He was only five the first time he marched in one, his mother’s finger clasped tightly in his hand, wondering when he was going to meet his new sibling. He didn’t understand when his cousins lowered the little wooden box into the ground and covered it with earth. Was it treasure? Were they hiding it from the baby? Lobelia Bracegirdle told him babies broke things, especially their older siblings’ toys. Maybe he should have put some of his toys in the box as well?

There was no time to go back and get them, so he stood quietly, waiting, until the grownups were done and everyone went home.

That night, his father closed the nursery door and locked it.

There were two other such treasure burying ceremonies in the next three years, one nearly on top of the other, and yet he still didn’t understand. Why would they bury the treasure if the baby was never going to come?

 “They’re not treasure chests, stupid!,” Lobelia said to him when he asked her, a sneer painted on her face. “They’re dead babies!”

“They are not!” His bottom lip trembled and his fists clenched.

“Uh-huh! My Mam says _your_ Mam ran off and had adventures and something happened and _that’s_ why all her babies die.”

He’d never hit a girl before, and hasn’t since, thank you, but something dark in his belly relished the shock on Lobelia’s face and the blood dribbling from her lip as she ran home crying.

Mrs. Bracegirdle arrived at Bag End later, plum faced and fuming, but his Da leveled her with a calm look and said, “Interesting notions she’s got, your girl. Seems to think visiting Elves leads to infertility.”

The woman sputtered, turned crimson all over, and rushed away without even staying for tea.

Rude.

Yet the damage was done. Bilbo and Lobelia would be enemies from that day forward.

As a tween, the marches were few and far between for Bilbo’s family. An uncle here, a distant cousin there. Tragedy, it seemed, had decided to take its leave from Bag End.

Until the Fell Winter. Then it returned with a vengeance, bringing cold and darkness, teeth and claws with which to destroy Bilbo’s warm, happy life. There were no marches, no graves to dig, for even if the ground were soft enough for the grave digger to do his work (which it was not) the wolves rarely left anything behind to bury.

He didn’t think anyone really knew the full scale of it, just how many had been killed, their blood bright red on white slow.

Bilbo didn’t know then that the number of losses in a lifetime didn’t matter. Sometimes the grief of loss passed on swiftly, sometimes it was beyond counting, and others times it would leave you decimated in the wake of its destruction.

It was a lesson he would learn, and learn well, and carry with him all the days of his life.

But spring had come, and the river melted, and the Hobbits of the Shire put the dark days behind them with good cheer.

For Bilbo, that happiness had been short lived. One summer day his Da had come inside from the garden complaining of pain in his arm. He’d offered luncheon, like a good son, but was waved away. “Just some tea, my lad,” Bungo had said. “My stomach has been turning today!”

Bilbo had only just put the kettle on when he heard the crash. He’d dashed back into the hall to find his Da face down on the carpet, pale and still as night air.

Holding his mother’s hand once again, he’d marched down Bagshot Row, eyes dry and head high, to the graveyard.

The next time he made the march there was no hand for him to hold. It too had gone pale and cold, though she had been resting in his father’s chair by the fire when he’d found her.

“Died of a broken heart, she did,” the people had said.

That was true enough, his father’s death had stolen the light out of Belladonna’s eyes, but if Bilbo had found remnants of his mother’s namesake flower[1] in her teacup and its berries in her finger cakes, he kept that information to himself.

He felt the loss his parents keenly, would lay awake at night wishing for a phantom hum of his mother’s voice or the gentle scrape of his father’s chair across wood floors.

But it was quiet, utterly silent, and he felt the loneliness roaring down on him.

If he could have, he would have marched for Bag End itself, for there was no life left under the Hill.

So how could he not have gone the Dwarves when they made their way from his smial, bent on undertaking their journey without their lucky fourteenth member, after they had brought so much life back into his home with their pipe smoke and laughter, song and dance? How was he supposed to stay behind, alone and desolate, when the world was so close at hand?

In his dotage he would sit at his writing desk and wonder if it was all worth it. How many marches had he seen because he’d run out his door? How many more loved ones had he lost?

And he had loved them, Thorin, Fili, Kili, and the others. Loved them with everything he had because, well, they _were_ everything. That ragtag group of Dwarves had been the closest thing to family, to a husband, brothers, and sons, he’d ever known.

He wished, many a time, that he had told Thorin how he’d felt. Wished with every bone and bit of skin in him that he’d had the courage, but he didn’t, and so all he could do in the end was march alongside the rest of the survivors through Erebors’ golden halls to the tomb that would hold three fourteenths of his patchwork family.

If, later, the Night Guard had seen him weeping atop the late kings sarcophagus and whispering to him that he was sorry, that he should have been better, stronger, faster, a more clever burglar, that is was his fault, all his fault, and he was so, so sorry….Well.

They were wise enough not to say.

Soon enough he’d marched out of Erebor, his losses piled high around his aching soul, creating walls that would only grow with age; grow and become a city of their own, built of sorrow and regret and words left unsaid, its streets paved with the names of those who had left him behind, beginning with Baby Boy Baggins and onward, up to the castle, to the empty throne of his heart, where Thorin Oakenshield would always be king.

The door to his smial remained shut tight, opening for no one, not even Hamfast Gamgee who came to tend the garden. Maybe, he’d thought, if he shut himself away, let no one else in, he wouldn’t have to march anymore.

He was right, to a point. So consumed with grief was he, so isolated from the world beyond his door that no one told him his beloved cousin Drogo and his wife Primula had drowned, leaving their little boy to neglect and abandon at Brandy Hall.

He did not march for them and a twinge of guilt took root inside him.

So he took in their little faunt, Frodo, and did his best for him. If he kept the boy healthy and safe then maybe, just maybe, there would be someone to march for Bilbo himself when the time came.

But that would not be, for his ring would go to Mount Doom where it would be destroyed. (Oh, that he could take Frodo to another mountain! Not south, but east! What an adventure that would be!)

Much of what happened after the Fellowship left Rivendell was lost on him, for Frodo found it too painful to speak of.

Bilbo knew all too well what that was like and left the boy to his thoughts.

It was Gandalf who told him of Balin’s passing, of Ori’s death at the hands of Goblins, of Oin’s watery grave.

He could not march for them. Age had caught up to him, rendered him feeble and decrepit, but he took out Thorin’s map and let his fingers trace the journey from Bag End to The Lonely Mountain as he had done a thousand times before.

When the time came they did not march, but ride, and Frodo was with him. Not as healthy and safe as Bilbo had wished, had meant for him to be, but the boy was alive and Bilbo gave thanks that he did not outlive his dear nephew, the last of all he’d loved in his long life.

That surely would have been one death too many for his tiny Hobbit shoulders.

And so they go west, to the Grey Havens, where the sea and tears are kith and kin, and further still, to Valinor, where Bilbo is young again and his heart not so heavy.

It is not a perfect place, can never be, for there are faces he longs to see even in his resting, and ever do his eyes turn farther west, to the Halls of Mandos, wishing for his king to come and rest upon the empty throne of Bilbo’s heart.

But at least there is no marching.

**Author's Note:**

> [1] Atropa Belladonna, commonly knows as Belladonna or Deadly Nightshade, is one of the most toxic plants found in the Easter Hemisphere. It’s berries pose a great threat to children because they look attractive (so much so that they are sometimes mistaken for blueberries) and have a sweet taste.
> 
> Two to five berries ingested by a human adult is probably lethal.
> 
> In the past it has been used as a muscle relaxant, anti-inflammatory, and to treat menstrual problems. In Middle-Earth it’s likely to have been grown in gardens for these reasons and would therefore be easy to acquire.
> 
> With this in mind, my headcanon for Belladonna Baggins (nee Took) is that, in a fit of depression after her husbands death, she went to the garden and retrieved some of her “namesake flower”, made tea and fingercakes with it, and thus ended her own life.
> 
> [2] The story title comes from a song called Sorrow by The National.


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